Found Page 2

  IN A PAPER Life, I told my story, and it was mine alone—the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction saga of being a child star in a dysfunctional show-biz family. But the story of my recent years is much more universal. This is the story of how I got sober, conquered my addictions once and for all, and am working to preserve that victory one day at a time. It is about the challenges and joys of being a mother; an ex-wife; and a single, middle-age actress. (Yes, I said it.) It’s about a woman who was once scared to get close to people but has learned how to be a friend and to trust in intimacy with others.

  Rebuilding a life means taking stock of what you have and what you’ve lost. As hope grew and I reemerged, I saw that there was an important person missing from my life: my father. Daddy. Ours was the most important relationship of my life, and it was nonexistent for nearly twenty years.

  More than anything, this is the story of a father and a daughter. When I wrote A Paper Life, I realized that there was no fairy-tale ending, that no life, particularly one in which a child is traumatized, is ever perfectly resolved. In the ongoing process of rebuilding my life, it was time to deal with my biggest unresolved issue. My dad. Ryan O’Neal. That strong, compelling movie star who was, at one time, my hero and my savior. Yet we had barely spoken in eight years. Even at my mother’s funeral in 1997, we acknowledged each other but did not speak. Now I felt confident, strong, and certain of what I wanted. I was ready to try again, to rebuild my relationship with my father after so much private and public estrangement. And so I began a slow, careful attempt to reconcile with him. That reconciliation ran an uneven path, growing, faltering, and, ultimately, persevering.

  When Ryan and I first had the idea to share our efforts to mend our fragmented relationship with a television audience, we both thought long and hard about whether to do it. The risks and pitfalls were obvious—we might reinjure our new, delicate relationship and/or expose our private lives. But the honesty that the camera brings appealed to me. I wanted us to face each other in a harsh spotlight, where we couldn’t hide anything, where each of us would have to take responsibility for how we had behaved in the past and who we were in the present. I wanted to force our secrets out into the open. Much as our lives have played out in public and on the screen, I felt the camera, with its unflinching mirror of truth, was the mediator most likely to propel us forward in our journey. My father would have a chance to show that he was not the man who, in a Vanity Fair article, said negative things about me and his sons; that he’s more than the mug shot seen around the world after he was arrested in 2007 for firing a gun at my brother Griffin. And I would have a chance to show that I’m more than the daughter of someone famous, the wife of someone famous, a drug addict whose children had made it in spite of me, not because of me.

  So this tale includes the ups and downs as we tried to forge a new relationship—at times a fraught, emotional, and seemingly doomed effort, but also a funny, surreal glimpse of a father and daughter who made an iconic film together in the early seventies, who’ve had their problems and still have them, who are celebrities but still regular people, trying to survive as father and daughter as best we can.

  WHAT DOES IT mean to forgive—literally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually? As far as I’m concerned, my father started me on a rocky path in life. What does it mean to watch a man who hurt you grow older, to see that the years you have left together are diminishing, day by day, and to realize you have to choose between accepting the person he is or letting him go forever? For so many years, I cut my father off, but I finally felt it was time to face him again and try to heal the wounds.

  I began this journey thinking that I needed to find a way to let go of the past—that forgetting was the only way to forgive. Parents and kids can make terrible mistakes. But as Ryan and I circled and spun, pulling each other closer and pushing each other away, I found that the past was always with me—always reasserting itself. Sometimes it was melancholy, sometimes hopeful. Sometimes it gave me strength. Sometimes it kept me true. But it always bound me to my father, with a complicated, ordinary, undying love.

  Ryan cannot change the past, but in making a TV show about our reconnection, I believed he had the opportunity to give us the present and a future, and that would be the best gift a father could give his daughter.

  I was terrified to bring my father back into my life. Ryan can be the most charming, sweet, gentle person in the entire world. I have always wanted to please him. I have always longed to bask in the glow of his acceptance and love. But I remembered his anger, and I still feared it. Still, I decided that if, regardless of my fear, Ryan and I could forgive each other and repair such a damaged relationship, then anyone can, and it would be an effort worth sharing.

  And so I am telling everything. The truth. The struggle. The hope. The love. I believe it is the right thing to do, and that it will bring the right outcome, whatever that may be. We are all dealt different hands, and some are tougher than others to survive. There are traumas and there is damage that create seemingly insurmountable hurdles. But I am as determined to move forward as I’ve ever been. You can and must survive, no matter what. That’s my motto. There is always hope.

  Part I

  Fractures

  Chapter One

  Outside and In

  I SPENT THE night of the arrest in a jail on the Lower East Side. I talked on the pay phone as long as I could, with my lawyer and with my boyfriend, Ron, who promised to talk to Emily. Then I lay on a bare foam pad, spooning with a pregnant prostitute, pretending to sleep while reliving the nightmare I had brought on myself. How had this happened? How had I gone wrong again?

  The next morning I was released from jail, and there were a thousand press people waiting for me. I soon found out that the cover of that day’s New York Post announced that I’d been arrested. Great. My oldest child, Kevin, had finished college and was working at a restaurant while he applied to grad schools. My middle child, Sean, was in Paris on a summer trip. Emily was in high school in New York. All I could think about was what this news would do to them. How horribly embarrassing for everybody. Why did I have to keep embarrassing them?

  I hurried into my lawyer Jodi’s Prius, and she told me I couldn’t return to my apartment—the press was there, too. I tried to contact my best friend, Kyle, on the phone, but it was Monday. Kyle, a colorist at a top hair salon, was unreachable. So I asked Jodi to drive me across town to my friends Hunter and Perry’s apartment.

  Hunter and Perry were among my closest friends while I was in New York, but because of my inability to bond with people, I kept even them at arm’s length, like everyone else. When I got to their house, I went into a bedroom and closed the door. Alone, I tried to process what was happening in my life. Alone—the only way I knew to endure the grief and anguish I was suffering. Again, I asked myself: How had this happened?

  The answer wasn’t black-and-white—it never is. I had been dedicated to sobriety for more than a decade, since 1994. I went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I had a sponsor to guide me through the twelve steps: Sandy. Sandy is a gentle, loving person. She has long hair parted down the middle, which, combined with her softness, makes her look like the Virgin Mary. She had helped me with my sense of self, and was teaching me to forgive myself. After the conflicted relationships I had had with my mother and other women through the years, Sandy was a very positive force in my life. I had a true friend in Kyle, who knew me better than anyone. I was complying with my divorce judge’s orders to drug-test biweekly, with a monitor in the room with me to prove I wasn’t cheating. I had a reliable and fulfilling routine, including being with my children on the weekends. With Emily, because she was the youngest, I had immediately seen the positive impact of our time together.

  Life wasn’t perfect, but by June 2008, I felt I was really becoming the woman I had always wanted to be.

  But the scary truth about addiction is that it doesn’t need a precipitating event. There is a switch in my head that, for seemingly arbitrar
y and insignificant reasons, can flip, and when it does, all the joy I’ve found in being sober slips out of reach. The switch flips and the voice starts playing: Why don’t I just use today? Why not?

  The longer I maintained my sobriety, the healthier I would be. Time, I would discover, was one of the great rewards of staying sober. Experiencing the richness of life without substances was a reward in itself. The obsession to use faded. Nothing can compare to how great things are when I am sober. It was so great to be accountable, to achieve my goals, to have my kids trust me and not worry if I didn’t answer my phone every time they called. But at the time of the arrest, my sobriety was still relatively young and immature. I wasn’t aware of how easily I could slip. I hadn’t developed the instinct to call my sponsor before making the dumb choice to get loaded. I hadn’t instituted enough safeguards—friends, meetings, obligations—to protect me from my weakest self.

  Where did that weakness come from? Someone once told me that I am always just a little bit sad. There is truth to that. From the time I was little, I have carried a sadness for how things ended with my family—with both my mother and my father, though in different ways.

  That recurring sadness wasn’t the only trigger. I had been suffering from debilitating nerve damage in my neck caused by a terrible car accident in 1976, after which my body was never the same. I had a chronic degenerative disk disease. I’d undergone one surgery and would end up having two more. The pain radiated from my neck to the tips of my fingers. It seemed unfair, because who deserves to be in that kind of pain? Despite the risks, which I knew as well as anybody else, I was prescribed pain meds by the doctor. I’d periodically taken them without abusing them. But this time, for some reason, taking a pill for my neck pain flipped a switch. That’s the cunning and baffling thing about addiction: it gets you when you least expect it.

  That said, it was not surprising that the arrest happened on a Sunday. Sundays were always my saddest, loneliest days. At the end of the weekends, my three kids had always gone back to John. Now it was just Emily, the last one still in high school, who returned to her father on Sunday nights. That fateful Sunday, one moment, I was sitting on my couch, missing all three of my kids. The next minute, I was out the door, trying to score some drugs. If it was crack I found, then it was crack I would use. Sure, this time, why not throw my life away? It’s Sunday. I have no kids, no friends, no life! I did, of course, have all of these things.

  BEING IN JAIL was the most horrible moment I’d had as a woman and a mother. The whole world now knew that I had drug problems. I was embarrassed for my children. What were the parents of their friends saying to them? How was my ex-husband going to handle it with them? I can’t stress enough how horrible I felt realizing what this would do to my teenage daughter and to my sons, who were young adults. What I was doing was illegal. And I was not just breaking laws, being irresponsible, damaging myself. The arrest shone a light on my real problem—the biggest and most powerful problem of all, always and only—the consequences of my addiction in the lives of my children. My children. I’m a mother. This was not what I wanted for them.

  All this is what I should have been thinking when I was walking down that street, on the verge of breaking my sobriety. Obviously.

  I know this sounds strange, but being arrested was scarier for me than when I used to cop heroin on the street. As a child I fell out of trees; I was thrown from a car; I broke my arm and my foot; I had been paddled, switched, and sexually abused. After all that, the idea of taking a drug was just not that big a deal. In fact, it made perfect sense. What better way to bear the mess of my life? But the arrest, more than anything I’d ever experienced, forced me to feel the effect on my beautiful children.

  This had been a problem all along, of course, but everyone has a line they won’t cross, and the arrest was the wake-up call I needed: using drugs was no longer an option for me. It had devastating, long-term effects on my children—their sense of self, of safety, of who their mother is, of how comfortable they are with me. For all the misery and self-flagellation of being arrested, something good happened in that jail cell. Something that changed me forever. I was scared straight.

  THE FIRST THING I did when I got to Hunter and Perry’s house was call Emily to apologize and see if she was all right. She just said, “I’m so glad you’re okay. I’m glad you didn’t use.” The boys felt the same way. They were perfect, so loving, generous, accepting, forgiving. They didn’t take the arrest nearly as hard as I did. They had been through enough to understand the disease of addiction. They got it. All that mattered to them was that I didn’t fall back into the cycle of using. Because they had spent so many years worrying that I would die, the arrest itself wasn’t that big a deal for them. It took a few weeks for my ex-husband to feel comfortable enough for me to see Emily, but he didn’t go to court to try to suspend her visitations. He made it clear to me that this was a considered decision; he meant it as a gesture of faith, and I appreciated it. When Kyle and I finally spoke, he was very upset and sad. The press had been calling him to ask about me. Did I go to the salon loaded? He had told them of course not. Now he asked if I would come stay with him, or if there was anything else he could do.

  That was the common thread. All around me, I found love and saw glimmers of hope. I was given love, support, and forgiveness. The work I had done to clean up my life was still in place. The scaffold of sobriety was still standing. It was the easiest thing in the world to keep on building.

  I ultimately came to see the arrest as a blessing in disguise. Sometimes God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. I was not meant to use those drugs that day. Instead, I lived through twenty-four hours of hell in jail, and I know I’ll never be there again. I saw how my addiction had wrecked everything in my life, but now, taking it one day at a time, I would never use again. I was done. And with that realization, I looked ahead and saw the beautiful, wonderful opportunity of a new life.

  I JUMPED BACK in with both feet, ready to go to any length for my sobriety. Within two days of my arrest, I was speaking at a meeting for cocaine addicts. Without missing any work, I returned to the set of the show Rescue Me, a series starring Denis Leary about the lives of a group of New York City firefighters, in which I played the part of Denis’s sister, Maggie Gavin, in the ensemble cast.

  There were a lot of actors on the set, a lot of Irish boys, and I seemed to fit in pretty well. We felt like a family. I had been with the show for four years at that point—what had started as a two-day part had grown into a series regular. Nonetheless, when I came back to the set after having been arrested, I was nervous. There was tension—I could feel everyone wondering if I was okay. Denis, who wasn’t in that day’s scene with me, appeared on set my first day back. I knew he was only there to support me and see if everything was okay. He had already gone on The View to say that I’d never been late, I’d never missed a day of work, and that he would work with me again in two seconds. He had called me and asked, “Tates, you okay? You all right there, Tates?” I was determined to show him and the others that they were right to trust and believe in me.

  The scene I had to do was not an easy one. I was supposed to try to seduce a guy in a wheelchair at the VA hospital in Staten Island. My character, Maggie, was a loose drunk. People may have joked, “Art imitates life, huh?” Not so much because I go around seducing the disabled—more the drunk part. But even at my worst, I was never a rough, drunk broad. And now I felt more sensitive and careful than ever. I did my scene and went home.

  Two weeks later, I had my second neck surgery.

  A FEW MONTHS after I recovered from the surgery, it was time to see Emily off to her first year of college. John and I took her to her school in Northern California together, as a family. My ex-husband and I had been at war for a long time. That trip was a big deal for us. The three of us had the typical awkward meeting with her roommates’ families, and then we trouped to Bed Bath & Beyond to buy miscellany for Emily’s dorm room. I knew having bo
th of her parents there together, managing to keep the peace, meant a lot to Emily. After we said our good-byes to our youngest child, John and I flew from San Francisco to L.A., sitting on the plane side by side. We hadn’t sat that close for more than a decade. It was awkward, to be sure, but there was finally some peace after years of acrimony.

  That trip marked the end of an era. I had stayed in New York for more than a decade after my divorce to see my children through elementary and high school, and they were thriving. Kevin had finished Skidmore and been accepted to Columbia for grad school. Sean was at Occidental. And now Emily was settling into the next phase of her life. I was very proud of them. And I saw what I had to do for myself. The time had come to make a change. I was ready to come home. To be found.

  Chapter Two

  Home Again

  I HAD LONG been homesick for California. Living on the Lower East Side, I was unsettled by the jackhammering and the hustle-bustle of sidewalks crowded with people from all walks of life. Cigarette smoke flowed from the street through my first-floor window, a daily assault. But my alienation from New York ran deeper than the everyday discomforts.